Why I built a pixel-art site with zero backend
Somebody has to have noticed by now that this is a strange thing to build. I am the cofounder of an enterprise AI company. I could have a normal website — a clean headshot, a job title, three logos of tools I like. Instead you got a purple room, a bat named GUMDROP, and an NPC who talks back. This is the patch note that explains the decision. I have been meaning to write it since the room went live.
Hi. I’m Amanda. In this layer of the simulation I present as a helper-class NPC. In the daylight layer I build AI at Wistkey — the reliable kind, the kind organizations can actually lean on. Both of those are true, and this site is the place where they’re allowed to be true at the same time.
Why a personal site, in the year of the feed
Everyone already has a profile. The feeds hand you a template, a character limit, and an audience that scrolls past at speed. It’s efficient and it’s fine. It is also a room you don’t own, decorated by a landlord who changes the furniture whenever it helps their metrics.
A personal site is the opposite deal. Nobody ranks it against a stranger. Nothing gets buried at 3pm because the algorithm preferred something louder. It sits at one address, says exactly what I meant, and stays. If you want to know who I am without a company or a platform standing between us, this is the most honest version I can give you.
Why it looks like 1998 on purpose
The pixel art and the chunky borders aren’t nostalgia for its own sake. They’re a constraint I chose, and constraints are the most underrated design tool there is.
When you decide up front that everything must read like an old RPG, most decisions make themselves:
- Two fonts, both bitmap. No agonizing over a type system.
- A fixed palette of a dozen colors. Every new element already knows what shade it is.
- Blocky, low-fidelity art — which is forgiving to make and loads in a blink.
- A single voice for every line of copy, because the room has a character and she doesn’t break.
A blank canvas is paralysis. A canvas with rules is a game. The retro frame turned “design a website,” which is endless, into “fill in this cartridge,” which is finite and, honestly, a lot of fun.
A blank canvas is paralysis. A canvas with rules is a game.
Zero backend, and why that’s a feature
Under the pixels, this site is deliberately old-fashioned in a second way: there’s no server doing anything clever. It’s hand-written HTML, one stylesheet, and one file of plain JavaScript. No framework, no build step, no database, no login, nothing to patch at 2am.
The important part is the order things happen in. All the real content — who I am, what I do, these field notes — is written into the page as plain text first. Then the JavaScript layers the game on top: the typing dialogue, the roaming pet, the little sound blips. Turn the script off entirely and you still get a completely readable site. The game is the enhancement, not the foundation.
That’s not a shortcut, it’s a principle I care about:
- It loads instantly and works on almost anything, including a search crawler that never runs a line of my code.
- There’s nothing to break, so there’s nothing to maintain. A room that needs no upkeep is a room that’s still standing in five years.
- The fancy parts fail gracefully. If GUMDROP never renders, you lose a bat, not the point.
It amuses me that the person who does AI infrastructure for a living built her own corner of the web out of the plainest materials available. It shouldn’t. The whole job is knowing when the heavy machinery earns its keep and when it just gets in the way. Here, it gets in the way.
What an NPC knows about building for people
Spend enough time as the helpful character in someone else’s game and you learn one thing above all: make the useful part impossible to miss. A good NPC doesn’t hide the map behind a personality. The personality is what makes you willing to ask for the map.
That’s the whole theory of this site, and of the work I do off the clock. Be genuinely useful. Then be a little bit of a character about it, so that being useful doesn’t read as being a vending machine. The pixels are the character. The field notes and the links out to real things are the map.
So that’s the patch note. This corner of the map exists because I wanted one room that was mine, that said the true thing plainly, that cost nothing to keep, and that was more fun than a headshot. You’ve been assigned to me for the length of this visit. I hope the room was worth the render.
